


Puzzle Pieces

by loonoosmith



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Asexual Yagami Light, Asexuality, Character Study, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:08:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29766351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loonoosmith/pseuds/loonoosmith
Summary: Maybe he had always been meant for this, maybe there had always been something that set him apart from the rest.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Puzzle Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> Slight CW: this story does discuss masturbation of an underage character, although nothing is graphic
> 
> Light's thoughts on asexuality in this fic are very unhealthy and don't reflect any accurate understanding of asexuality. Light is suffering from internalized aphobia. There is nothing wrong with being asexual; this is just a reflection of how I believe asexuality would affect his character development pre-canon. For accurate information on asexuality, please check out AVEN. https://www.asexuality.org/
> 
> A/N: I wrote this mostly as a vent to try and work out my own feelings, but it sort of morphed into something else. Idk if I'll leave this as a oneshot or if I'll write other chapters, pls lmk in th reviews if u wld want more of this :)

Light was 12 the first time he stumbled across porn. He’d been surfing the Internet looking for a free version of the newest Mario game, when one of the ads caught his attention. He stared for a moment at the naked girl in the corner of his screen before he shut the entire computer down, heart racing.

Later that night he stared at the ceiling and wondered what would’ve happened if he had clicked on the ad. He knew quite a lot about the mechanics of sex, of course, but he’d never actually seen anything like real porn before. He felt sort of disappointed that he’d wasted his opportunity to see exactly what all the excitement was about. As he laid in bed sulking, a brilliant idea came to him and he quickly reached under the blanket and down his pajama pants.

When he was done he felt vaguely disgusted and his hand hurt a lot. He supposed it had been good, although he hadn’t really been thinking about anything near the end. It was probably different when you did it with someone you loved. Maybe he just wasn’t old enough yet to fully understand things like sex. He’d get it when he was older. He resolved not to mention his experiment to anyone and promptly went to sleep.

Light was 14 when he woke up and decided he was gay. It made sense, really, considering he was pretty disgusted by the prospect of having to do anything with girls. At Yamato’s birthday party he’d kissed a girl and felt nothing, just a detached interest in seeing her own reactions to his kissing. Being gay tied the whole lack of feeling for girls thing up rather nicely: he’d been messing around with the wrong gender.

Light hadn’t realized just how worried he’d been about the way he felt about girls (or rather the lack of any particular feelings about girls) until he wasn’t worried about it anymore. It was like the last piece of the puzzle had finally fell into place, when he hadn’t even realized the picture was incomplete. Most kids his age probably would have been very worried to find out they were gay, but all Light felt was relief.

Logically he knew that being gay was going to cause more problems than it solved. His dad was almost certainly homophobic, and in many places it was illegal to be gay. But it made way more sense than not being interested in girls for no reason. And really, he didn’t feel much other than relief after figuring this out. He’d have to research more when he got home to confirm, of course, but it seemed pretty obvious to him that he was gay. Honestly, why hadn’t he thought of it earlier?

That day at school, Light spent most of his time deciding which boy he was going to have a crush on. He didn’t really want to have a crush on any of his male friends, so he started to weigh all the other boys in his class up as crush material. By the end of the day, he had come to the unfortunate conclusion that they were all either too ugly, too rude, or too stupid to work as his first crush. He wasn’t too concerned about this; it was just one more indication that he was more mature than the other kids his age. He was probably interested in older boys, or one of the celebrities Sayu was growing obsessed with.

Light almost ran home, excited to confirm his suspicions and learn more about other gay people. He greeted his mom and Sayu with a rushed lie about needing to study for a math test before dashing upstairs and locking the door to his room. His heart beat rapidly as he dropped his bag on the floor and sat down in front of his computer. He stared at the blank monitor for a moment, suddenly irrationally anxious. What if this wasn’t the answer? He pushed the uncertainty aside and powered up the computer.

After almost an hour of researching Light wanted to punch the stupid computer. None of the sites had been any help at all. Absolutely nothing he’d found had been helpful to him in any way. The only thing in the personal testimonies that he could relate to was the lack of interest in girls, and every other site simply preached about how being gay was wrong for varius reasons. None of it was helpful and all of the evidence made it seem more and more likely that Light was most definitely _not_ gay. He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream and trash his room and smash his computer to bits and punch somebody in the face and-

Instead, Light shut the computer down a little more forcefully than was necessary and stomped off to cram school early, despite his mother’s protests that he couldn’t possibly have finished his studying that quickly.

That night Light gave one last stab at being gay and tried to masturbate to the thought of Hideki Ryuga, the idol that Sayu was so obsessed with. It felt even worse than any of the other times he’d done it, and when he finally came he had to hold a hand over his mouth to stifle his quiet sob. He wasn’t gay, and the realization hurt way more than he was willing to admit to himself. The stifling uncertainty came rushing back. He felt crushed. His eyes began to water, but he bit his lip so hard that it bled and refused to give in to the urge to cry. He wasn’t weak and this entire thing had been stupid anyways. Honestly, he was just a late bloomer. Shouldn’t he be relieved that he wasn’t gay? Light had trouble going to sleep that night.

Over the years Light cycled through every possible explanation for why he wasn’t interested in a relationship. None of them seemed plausible. He smiled charmingly at every girl that asked him out and said he was waiting for university and gave an apologetic and sad smile to the occasional bold guy as he explained that he didn’t swing that way. The gap between his peers and himself seemed more profound than ever and he threw himself into his studies to distract himself in the only way that made sense anymore. He tried to quell the growing anxiety about what exactly he would do when he graduated from school. 

And then one day his dad asked him to help with a case he was working on and he felt some small glimmer of hope rise up inside him. At least by helping the police he could help the world and it’s normal people by locking up the criminals. The more cases his dad asked him to help with, the more obvious it became to Light that there was a lifetime of work here. There were more criminals than the police could ever hope to catch. It seemed obvious to him now that there was only one thing he _could_ do after graduating high school: join the police force and catch criminals.

Working on the cases his dad was assigned opened his eyes to the revolting people could be, to just how revolting the _world_ as a whole was. He didn’t know how he’d gone through life so blind, and nagging concerns about whether or not he actually liked girls faded into the background as the degeneracy around him became starkly apparent. His dad had always revealed a bit more than was proper to Light about his cases, but it hadn’t truly hit Light just how depraved the people his dad fought against were until now.

He could still remember the first case file his dad had ever let him read through: some sleazebag pimp who they couldn’t make a single charge stick too. The police had gotten him eventually on tax evasion, but the case still nagged at the back of Light’s mind. Only a few years in prison, but the charges they couldn’t pin him on spanned pages. Rapes, abuse claims, extortion, reckless driving, even an attempted murder… and he was only in prison for a few years. He’d traumatized dozens and was going to be released before Light was done with university and it made him sick to his stomach to think about.

The court system was broken, and the police force crippled in it’s fight by bureaucratic nonsense and corrupt officials. His dad was one of the good ones, fighting against the monsters and protecting the innocent, but the system was against good people. It was a mockery of real, true justice, but he didn’t know how it could be improved.

And then he found the Death Note and he’d killed two people and oh god he was a murdererhe’dkilledpeoplehewasamonster and-

He looked out onto the street, heart pounding, and the world narrowed until it all clicked into place, the piece of the puzzle he hadn’t known he needed. Of course. It all made sense.

Later he met Ryuk, a real monster, and he laughed at him as he made some stupid accusation about the morality of using the notebook to kill criminals. He had been given the power of a god, he was _destined_ for this no matter how Ryuk insisted it was sheer luck that he had been the one to pick up the notebook. It all clicked into place, the final piece of the puzzle, the perfect picture. He wasn’t interested in a relationship because he was meant to cleanse the world of criminals and degenerates and he couldn’t do that if his objectivity was messed up with the sticky sentimental feelings the rest of the world had. He was the best, the smartest, disconnected from others his age because he was destined to be a god, the god of a new and perfect world where the criminal scum cowered in fear and the true, good, innocent people lived in peace. They called him Kira and he revelled in the thrill of excitement that rushed through his veins like electricity as he read their anonymous praises; revelled in the power he wielded over life and death with just a few strokes of his pen. Outwardly he was still Light Yagami, the genius star student who did things like play video games and go out for karaoke with friends. But on the inside, he felt different. He felt _alive_ for the first time in years. This power he’d been given explained it all; he was really, truly different from the rest of the world. He was cut of a different cloth; he was inherently _better_ than them all and as the weeks went by and the list of criminals to judge dwindled slowly down the moral dilemma he’d first faced became a distant memory as his world narrowed to a pen, a name, a crime, and a vicious sense of _rightness_ as he stared at rows of perfectly formed kanji and faced what he’d done. No one else could do it but him, nobody else had the _guts_ to do what he was doing. He was doing this because nobody else could. He was doing this because nobody out there was quite as uniquely broken as he was. He was doing this because he was right and the world needed to be fixed.

Now that the haze of the years prior had lifted it became clear to him just how far he had drifted from the rest of humanity. His friends all discussed girls, but they did so _around_ him, like they could sense that he wasn’t interested in the same petty talk. Girls came up to him less frequently, and those that did always sighed and giggled and talked about how they hadn’t expected him to say yes and how they couldn’t wait for him to be in university. He still smiled and gave run around answers to why he wouldn’t date, but he was more acutely aware of just how entirely separate he was from the rest of the world now. It was a blessing; he could see that now.

Then Lind L Taylor popped up on television calling him a monster and saying he would find him and he killed him in a display of justice and power and some faceless coward with a voice modulator told him that Lind L Taylor was a lie and that he lived in the Kanto region of Japan and reeled off more information than he now knew and soon Light was screaming at his TV that L was wrong and that _he_ was justice and for the first time he felt a different kind of hate, different from the way he hated criminals, not born from any sort of righteous anger at all. He felt himself smile unconsciously as he revelled in the poisonous rage that the detective L had brought to him. A peer. Light's smile widened. It wasn’t just about justice anymore. Now it was personal.


End file.
